Ribs wrote:Just selling briskly - I expect Sinbad was a little slow to start because some were holding off in case the issue would be corrected but going off the included unit #s people shared to Indicator's FB and Twitter it seemed like they'd reached about halfway through the run when it first released. If it were actually anywhere near on track to sell out before release they'd surely be happy to give us the heads-up.

I don't know how much it means but I may as well note that I picked up the Sinbad set a couple of weeks ago through Amazon.co.uk and it was numbered 3824 of 6000.

(To keep with the theme, googling Sinbad brings the comedian up first rather than the sailor!)

My Sinbad (from my earlier post & picture) is numbered 0144/6000. So either it's a coincidence that I got an earlier number or they are selling REAL fast (or Amazon got a shipment of later #'s).

Also, I have ordered the rest of their posted catalogue. I got this email from John:

"Thank you so much for your order, the three titles that are catalogue will be sent out to you from
Sony Distribution very shortly. We are temporarily out of stock on The Reckoning, so we will send this out to
you when the future releases are sent to you. I do hope this is agreeable to yourself."

tenia wrote:I also love these Super 8 versions. It's a real curiosity to see how they can sum up a 100 minute movie into roughly 20 minutes.

In which case you'll probably be even more fascinated by the fact that at least half the Super 8 versions were repackaged as black and white silent films, for the benefit of those with projectors that lacked sound - which was a lot more common in the 1960s and 70s than you might have expected. I suspect the black and white was to make them cheaper to mass-produce.

Usually the silent and/or black & white versions came first - often in abridgements lasting well under 10 minutes! It was only around the mid-1970s, when sound projectors became more affordable, and Super 8 (the Bluray of its day!) had superseded Standard 8, that most studios started to release the twenty-minute cutdown versions with sound and (where appropriate) colour. Oddly though, in the 1960s, there had been several complete features, including Psycho, available in Standard 8 sound from Universal (before Super 8 took off).

7th Voyage and Jason and the Argonauts were anomalies, though, in that, long before the twenty-minute (400 feet) abridgements were popularised, Columbia made these titles available in 4 x 200ft editions, each part being sold separately. The episodic nature of the films made them suitable for this.

Some releases, including these two Harryhausen titles if I remember correctly, were available in both Standard and Super 8mm formats, colour or black & white, sound or silent - and each and every permutation of those formats. The boxes were usually the same, but a small sticker on the front specified the format. The price tended to be double for sound, and around double again for colour and sound. It was a very expensive hobby; the complete features I bought of Holiday and The Third Man, when they eventually became available in the late 1970s, cost me around £80-90 - about £400 each in today's money.

If I recall correctly, Columbia were the first major studio (at least in the UK) to enter the "400ft sound abridgement" market but they came in for a lot of criticism with their use of a narrator to bridge the storyline gaps. This was after the four-part Harryhausen editions but I remember it very well on The Wild One, where the narrator even instructs the viewer on how to interpret some scenes. The interjections of the "Columbia narrator" were dreaded!

I still have 1970s copies of Super 8 Collector magazine, which reviewed the home movie editions for the skill with which they were edited, besides image and sound quality. Unfortunately, these varied greatly from print to print! Most commercial Super 8 colour prints have now faded very badly (often to pink).

An I reading PH's website properly when seeing that the last remaining Sinbad boxsets are offered in this combination but is otherwise sold out there ?

It appears to me that Indicator is currently selling The Sinbad Trilogy boxset as either an individual purchase or as part of the Harryhausen Birthday Special.
Either way, the limited availability of the Harryhausen Birthday Special is based on the limited stock of Sinbad Trilogy boxsets. Once those are sold out, no more will be available for purchase as either an individual purchase or a birthday special.

I received my Harryhausen Birthday Special order today and it did come with an extra BD of Eye of the Tiger while the Sinbad set itself was still shrink-wrapped. No explanatory note, no sticker, and as far as I could tell no different markings on the disc itself (sometimes corrected discs say "second pressing" or something similar). No on-screen message either when popping the disc into the player. If I had not known about the problem with the initial release, I would have been quite baffled by the inclusion of this disc, as I suppose some other customers must have been. Is there really no way to check if the extra disc is indeed the corrected version, besides playing both discs to compare the image quality? By the way, my set bore #108, the other two are in the 6 and 7 hundreds.

It's amusing to see the 8 mm versions included as extras; I remember seeing them advertised in the back pages of Warren magazines like Eerie, Creepy and of course Famous Monsters a few decades ago.

I received my Harryhausen Birthday Special order today and it did come with an extra BD of Eye of the Tiger while the Sinbad set itself was still shrink-wrapped. No explanatory note, no sticker, and as far as I could tell no different markings on the disc itself (sometimes corrected discs say "second pressing" or something similar). No on-screen message either when popping the disc into the player. If I had not known about the problem with the initial release, I would have been quite baffled by the inclusion of this disc, as I suppose some other customers must have been. Is there really no way to check if the extra disc is indeed the corrected version, besides playing both discs to compare the image quality? By the way, my set bore #108, the other two are in the 6 and 7 hundreds.

It's amusing to see the 8 mm versions included as extras; I remember seeing them advertised in the back pages of Warren magazines like Eerie, Creepy and of course Famous Monsters a few decades ago.

hmm... if i didn't get an extra disc, and my set is in the 5600s, should I be concerned?